# Giovanni Scuderi

Giovanni Scuderi (born 24 May 1935) is an Italian politician and general secretary of the Italian Marxist–Leninist Party (PMLI), which was established by him and others on 10 April 1977.

## Early life and political career

Scuderi was born in Avola, Sicily. He became an employee of the municipal waste disposal company in Florence. Afterwards, he began his political militancy in the left-wing current of Christian Democracy (DC) from 1959 to 1964. During this period as a DC member, he supported the advent of the centre-left and the Organic centre-left, and subsequently for dialogue and government collaboration with the Italian Communist Party (PCI). His reasoning from exiting the DC was highlighted by l'Unità.
In 1967, along with three other Marxist–Leninist militants, Scuderi joined the Federation of Marxist–Leninist Communists of Italy, which was one of the first splits among Marxists–Leninists in Italy. He left it in 1968 and joined the Communist Party of Italy (Marxist–Leninist) (PCd'I (ml)), becoming its provincial secretary of Florence. He had a clash with Angiolo Gracci [it], who separated from the party to form the PCd'I (ml) – Red Line, and then with the latter's general secretary Fosco Dinucci [it].

## Italian Marxist–Leninist Party

In 1969, Scuderi established the Marxist–Leninist Italian Bolshevik Communist Organization and Il Bolscevico (The Bolshevik). Inspired by the Cultural Revolution and the protests of 1968, the paper was founded three days after the Piazza Fontana bombing; he was the first to publicly define the bombing a strage di Stato (a massacre thought to be organized by organs of the state) as part of the strategy of tension in Italy. He was the newspaper's first political director and supported the unity of the Italian Maoists against the perceived revisionism of the PCI. In 1977, he established the PMLI in Florence and became its general secretary, a position that he maintains into the 2020s. During his political struggle, among the works he wrote are an essay for the International Seminary on Marxism–Leninism. His works are diffused in Italy, Mexico, and Ukraine. Scuderi lives in Florence, where the headquarters of the PMLI are located.
Scuderi considers the October Revolution "a historical event that demonstrated that the proletariat is capable of conquering political power and building socialism." Since the 1980s, former Italian partisan Enio Sardelli [it] was close to the PMLI. In 1998, Scuderi wrote a tribute to Pol Pot upon his death. At the 5th Plenary Session of the 5th Party Central Committee, which was held in Florence on 11 October 2015, while condemning terrorist attacks, Scuderi affirmed his support for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant against the global forces of imperialism. He also supported the 2021 Taliban offensive on anti-imperialist grounds, while commenting that "there is an abyss between the PMLI and the ideology, strategy, program, methods of struggle, and anti-female policy of the Taliban". In 2022, he condemned the Russian invasion of Ukraine as imperialism, which he defines it as "the mortal enemy of all the peoples of the world", expressed support for the Ukrainian resistance, and described Vladimir Putin as the new tsar who is heading a neo-Nazi army. In March 2022, the Vatican invited Il Bolscevico to a public debate, which Scuderi accepted.